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It did not take long for Paul Spiegel and Len Rubenstein to react after President Donald Trump first tried to institute a travel ban on people from seven Muslim countries. Shortly after that executive order was signed in late January, Spiegel, director of the Center for Humanitarian Health at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Rubenstein, a faculty member in the school's Center for Public Health and Human Rights, responded with a comment in The Lancet. They called for the ban's repeal, emphasizing the harm it could do to refugees who had fled war or persecution.

In particular, they focused on the plight of the millions of Syrians chased from their country by a brutal and chaotic civil war now entering its seventh year. The executive order would not only have blocked for four months the resettlement of all refugees hoping to come to America; it would have suspended indefinitely the entry of any Syrians, describing that influx as "detrimental to the interests of the United States."